Wednesday, July 10, 2013

CVN 78

Great Satan"s latest greatest globe prowling hyperpuissance platform (she also functions as sovereign American turf via International Law) is fixing to hit the hood and she is phantastique!!Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), with the christening and launch of on Nov. 9, 2013.

This will mark the beginning of a new class of aircraft carriers that will be in service for the next 94 years. With exception of the hull, virtually everything has been redesigned to make the Ford class more capable and more powerful than in the Nimitz class. This new class of carrier will build on the legendary performance of the Nimitz class carriers and will provide 25 percent more combat capability, increased service life margins throughout the ship to handle the aircraft and weapon systems of the future including unmanned aircraft and futuristic directed energy weapons, as well as driving down the total ownership cost of the ship by $4 billion over its 50 year service.The ship’s island is smaller and moved farther aft than on the Nimitz class and that there are no rotating antennas on atop the island. This is because CVN 78 will be the first ship to get the new dual-band radar that operates with phased array radars similar to AEGIS.The smaller island and its location farther aft also provides for more flight deck space that combined with new weapons elevators and a NASCAR pit stop refueling concept will allow us to rearm and refuel aircraft faster to turn them around for the next mission. The net result is a 25 percent increase in sortie generation rate as compared to a Nimitz class carrier.

This allows pilots to launch and land with heavier aircraft, enabling the launch of lighter unmanned aircraft in the future. A secondary benefit of the electromagnetic aircraft launching system and advanced arresting gear is the ability to apply launch and recovery forces more evenly, producing less stress on the airframe and potentially saving on aircraft maintenance.These are just a couple of the new technologies on CVN 78 that will lead the Navy and naval aviation with a true leap forward over the next century. CVN 78 construction is about 63 percent complete. We expect to commission the ship in the second quarter of 2016. At the same time that we are getting ready to christen CVN 78, we have begun advance construction on the John F. Kennedy (CVN 79). We are working directly with the shipyard to incorporate the lessons learned from the construction of CVN 78 along with new game changing build strategies that will significantly reduce the cost of CVN 79 and future ships of the class.